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Hundreds of Little Things

Last week I came across a blog post about the new release of an image editor called Acorn. I don’t use Acorn, but one part of the post appealed to me. In a section titled “Hundred of Little Things” the author talked about fixing bugs in Acorn:

It took months and months of work, it was super boring and mind numbing and it was really hard to justify, and it made Acorn 5 super late. But we did it anyway, because something in us felt that software quality has been going downhill in general, and we sure as heck weren’t going to let that happen to Acorn.

Most of my past week was fixing lots of small and annoying little bugs in my summer project. Some of them were edge cases in the core functionality of the system, but a lot of them were little bits and pieces and rough edges that I would have normally just let pass. I do agree that software quality seems to be going downhill in general. One way to fix it is to pay attention to all the little things that we usually let slip past. On a related note, I think that writing software in a way that doesn’t allow these little things to slip past us is still unnecessarily difficult and complicated, but that’s a matter for another post.